Zenithink ZT 180 Android Tablet Review

Android is the one of the most spoken of Open Source operating systems off late. Starting off with cellular devices, Android has grown quite well. It has now spread its wings over tablets as well. Be it Samsung, Zenithink, Freescale; ? all of these have an Android OS powering them.

Having looked at the number of tablets out there, I decided it was high time to invest in one so I began scouting the web for reviews, feedback, opinions to short list a few, however, one thing was clear, it wasn't going to be a Mac this time around as I already have the iPhone 4as well as a MacBook, it was high time to get the feel of an Android device; ? something that wouldn't cost a bomb but would do the job well.

One such device that caught my attention was Zenithink's ZT 180 Android tablet

The main thing about this tablet device is its 10 inch display screen, which is bigger than most of the other tablet devices in the market and in line with that of the iPad. Well, one cannot expect iPad like performance, but hey it costs one third of what the iPad costs

The ZT 180 tablet device has a 10.2-inches LED-backlit high quality resistive touchscreen display which looks quite cool and is crisp. E-mails, pictures, documents displayed quite well and there were no glitches, dead pixels, etc. The latest models have a resolution of 1024-by-600 pixels and a16:9 aspect ratio.

It comes loaded with Google Android 2.1 and 1024 being the latest firmware as of today. The ZT 180 is quite quick with its 1GHZ; ARM11 processor backed by 256MB DDR RAM. It addition to 2GB onboard memory, this tablet device also has a TF card slot and supports a MicroSD card up to 32GB which is quite impressive.

The future of learning

The Future of Learning

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

What is the future of education? With the upsurge in ownership of smart mobile devices such as iPhones, Androids and Blackberries, the rapid social penetration of touchscreen computers such as iPads, and an increase in the purchase of Kindles and other e-reader devices, the future of learning is definitely smart mobile. 80 per cent or so of the learning that most of us engage in is of an informal nature. Informal learning is becoming an increasingly enriched experience with personal tools, and there is improved connectivity too, ensuring that anyone who has a mobile smart device is more likely to be able to connect to the Internet quickly and seamlessly. Social networking sites and online media sharing sites are also enjoying exponential increases in membership, leading to the supposition that this generation is a profoundly connected generation. Students will use Facebook when they want to, and their institutional managed learning environment when they have to.

It is clear that education will not share the same future as the state funded school, because education and school are not synonymous. It doesn't end at school either. Those who pursue formal learning to the level of further and higher education will experience a growing gulf between the capabilities of the technology they arrive with in their hands, and technology that is provided in the classroom. They are different tools, for different purposes. The Blackberry or iPhone will be used to connect to informal learning and friends, for fun, entertainment and social purposes. The institutional system will be used for connecting to formal learning, and activities that are more formalised and by their nature, less entertaining and engaging. The personal technologies will be sleek, attractive, must-have, rapid action and intuitive devices, while the institutional systems will be rule-bound, clunky, opaque and bland. It follows that many students will prefer to access learning resources, their tutors and peers through their own personal technologies. We will thus witness a gradual decline in on-campus learning, with an increasing number of blended programmes made available to meet the demand of an increasingly mobile student population. Because students will increasingly rely on smart mobile tools for learning, FE and HE institutions may agree special arrangements with telecommunications companies to offset the call cost for students, as a trade off to the money the save by reducing their on-campus operations.

The blended learning courses of the future will be those that combine formal and informal learning features. Formal learning will be undertaken mainly for the purpose of gaining accreditation, informal learning will be engaged with for the remainder of the waking hours. Unless we can harness the power, excitement and richness of the informal personalised learning experience and translate it into formalised settings, we will continue to see a widening rift between school and education. The slideshow above - a part of the keynote speech I gave at LearnTEC in Karlsruhe, Germany, earlier this month - illustrates these and other thoughts about what we might see in the future of learning.


The future of learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.